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Blown away: Winning the battle with the bugs

4 min read

Mosquitoes find me fetching. Gnats can’t stay away from me. Fleas are always flirting.

When outdoors in the summer, you’ll find me in a cloud of bugs. As a kid, I was always covered in mosquito bites that I would scratched into angry red bumps.

And now, all these years later, I’m as attractive to bugs as ever. I’ve written about the fleas that fly around my sunglasses and into my eyes while I’m riding my bike; larger bugs go for my mouth.

And now I find myself spending the summer in the woods. I’m part of a film crew that’s producing a documentary about the bike trail from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh, an assignment that is taking us to all sorts of wooded locations. Even in the most remote parts of the mountains of West Virginia (and maybe especially in those parts), the swarms find and follow me.

And don’t get me started about the ticks.

Bug spray, you say? As producer of the team, I carry many cans and bottles of insect repellent: the kind you spread on your face, the kind you spray on your arms and the kind you spray directly onto your clothing.

I hate the stuff. Even a few seconds of spraying produces a noxious cloud that can’t be good for me or for anyone within 50 yards of me. I hold my breath and then dash to a safe place outside the cloud of poison to take a clean breath.

I cover my legs with that stuff, mostly to keep the ticks off me.

Dry, wooded areas are bad enough. Add a month of rain to a trail in the forest and you double the bug population. Gnats and fleas clamor for me like kids at a Beyoncé concert.

Not wanting to spray repellent on my head, I had to find another way. And a fencing helmet would just look stupid.

It was my lead photographer who came up with the idea of how to bug-proof our faces. If you blow air around your head, the bugs can’t get close. Picture a leaf blower chasing the leaves away.

He was wearing around his neck a personal fan – plastic and about the size and shape of a deck of cards. It lies against the upper chest like a pendant necklace, and blows air toward your face, creating windy headspace that won’t allow gnats, fleas or mosquitoes to land.

“Five bucks at the drug store,” he said, and I went looking for one. They’re sold all over the place; they take a couple of AA batteries.

This is the sort of thing I could have used when my kids were in elementary school. Come September, the classrooms were warm because summer was not yet gone. The kids would complain that they were feeling too hot and sleepy to concentrate. A couple of those fans might have changed the course of things in third grade.

And the fan is working to keep the bugs away from my face. The air doesn’t get to the back of my head, so I don’t know what’s going on back there. But I’m happy to be able to do my work out there without constantly swatting. If they made the fans just a bit more powerful, I could see teen girls using them to get the glamorous windblown look on their selfie photos.

Alas, the fan doesn’t repel ticks. After a long day in the woods last week, I found that a tick had breached the wind moat and climbed into my bra. The tick had croaked before burrowing in and doing any harm.

I think the toxic cloud got him.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.

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